David A. Hafler, MD

Dr. Hafler is the William S. and Lois Stiles Edgerly Professor and Chairman Department of Neurology and Professor or Immunobiology, Yale School of Medicine, and is the Neurologist-in-Chief of the Yale-New Haven Hospital. He graduated magna cum laude in 1974 from Emory University with combined B.S. and M.Sc. degrees in biochemistry, and the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1978. He interned in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins followed by a neurology residency at Cornell Medical Center-New York Hospital in New York. Dr. Hafler was trained in immunology at the Rockefeller University and then at Harvard where he joined the faculty in 1984 and later became the Breakstone Professorship of Neurology at Harvard and was a founding Associated Member of the Broad Institute at MIT. In 2009 he moved to Yale as the Chair of the Department of Neurology. Dr. Hafler is a clinical scientist with a research interest in the mechanism of multiple sclerosis with over 370 publications in the field of MS, autoimmunity and immunology. He is a co-founder of the International MS Genetic Consortium, a group that identified the genes causing MS. Dr. Hafler has been elected to membership in the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Alpha Omega Society, and was a Weaver Scholar of the NMSS. He has served as a member of the editorial boards for Journal of Clinical Investigation and the Journal of Experimental Medicine, and is co-founder of the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies and leads the NIH Autoimmunity Prevention Center Grant at Yale. Dr. Hafler was a Jacob Javits Merit Award Recipient from the NIH and has won many awards including 2010 Dystel Prize for MS research from the American Academy of Neurology, the Raymond Adams Prize in 2015 from the American Neurologic Association and the 2016 Frontier Lecturer at the AAN. Dr. Hafler received the University of Miami Annual Distinguished Alumni Award in 2010.